Site Enhancements - 2011.06.16

Here's a quick update on some things we did during this morning’s interruption.

Online Chess Changes

We added new tab behavior to the right of the board. Because not everyone chats, “Moves” is now the default tab selection when the page loads.

But we’re not being anti-social! The Chat tab will always have focus as players make their first moves in each game. And the Chat tab will also have focus any time you have new messages to read. (If you like to chat during your games, you may not even notice the change. But if you don’t chat often, the emphasis will generally be on the move-history and other features there.)

Also, for players who like to consult the Explorer for opening statistics, we’ve made the Explorer window bigger. Until now, users had to scroll horizontally to see the whole thing if they linked to it from the "Moves" tab in Online Chess.

Finally, for unrated players we’ve replaced the default “1200” in most contexts with the term “unrated,” which is easier to understand for many new users. (This is just a change in presentation; ratings calculations for unrated players still use 1200.)

Other Stuff

If you like, you may now turn off Tactics Tags in your Tactics Trainer Settings. (Several users complained that they didn’t like getting “hints” before retrying a failed puzzle.) If you don't ever want to see or vote on tags, just uncheck the box that says "Show Tags."

We made some nice cosmetic improvements to Messages!

Again, lots of little bug-fixes… For one, we fixed the problem that prevented people from downloading the PGN from a Vs Computer game.